I am the co-founder of SocialRank and previously led business development and partnerships for online integrations at Dwolla, a payments startup based in Iowa, as well as for Aviary, a NY-based startup that provides a photo editing API for web and mobile devices. I'm active in the NY tech scene as the creator of the BD Meetup and an advisor to early-stage companies and have been featured in Business Insider as one of the “Top 20 Under 25” in the NY tech scene. I write a blog called Alex’s Tech Thoughts, have been published in Fast Company, The New York Observer, The Next Web and VentureBeat, teach Business Development classes and have been quoted on many tech websites including TechCrunch, GigaOm, The New York Times, Business Insider, Mashable, and PC Magazine. I hold a BA in Economics from Yeshiva University. You can reach me at Ataub24(at)gmail(dot)com.

Teespring: Is This Rhode Island Based Startup The Future Of Custom Apparel?

When I was in college I worked on a project with a few friends that we called Aplufant. The idea was to merge produce and animals (apple and elephant = Aplufant) and design cool apparel featuring the motifs. One of our biggest problems at the time was a prohibitively high upfront cost. Ordering a few hundred T-shirts with the printed designs cost us an arm and a leg and we couldn’t sustain more than two orders of 500 shirts each without going broke. We created a few characters, ordered and sold a few hundred shirts, but ended up discontinuing selling the product as we couldn’t afford to order more without borrowing substantial capital (for college students this is a few thousand dollars).

A month ago I received an email from two of the other founders, Eli Snyder and Yosef Gillers, saying that they wanted to give Aplufant another go. While not having the bandwidth I had during college to work on it, I told them I would be supportive and help where I was able. One of the first things I brought up was a reminder of the upfront cost issue. This led to a search for a solution that fit our needs: affordable apparel printing before any orders could come in. They wanted flexibility to design different characters/logos as well as not being on the hook if one of the designs didn’t resonate with fans. All of this led to discovering Teespring, a promising startup out of Providence, Rhode Island.

Snyder and Gillers are bringing back Aplufant under a new guise: Animal Orchard. Aplufant is still one of the characters, but they have decided to bring a few new friends into the fold: Pearguin (pear + penguin), Cucumbear(cucumber + bear), and Bananaraffe (banana + giraffe). Along with the Animal Orchard classic tee. Using Teespring they can now test which characters people like, as the character will hit the minimum threshold. This is a lot more opportunistic than putting a few thousand dollars towards ordering shirts and hoping orders will come in. To say Teespring is a hit with the team is an understatement. It addresses every issue an upstart apparel brand has.

The Teespringbackstory intrigues many. Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton met while studying at Brown University. During their senior year, a campus-favorite dive bar was shut down. They saw Facebook and Twitter light up and they decided to see if they could create a T-shirt around the buzz. They called their local screen printer only to find out that they needed to know exactly how many T-shirts and what sizes would be needed. They also had to pay for everything upfront (which equaled thousands of dollars for 200+ T-shirts) and it would take two weeks for the T-shirts to be ready. Those three things didn’t work for Walker and Evans, as they didn’t know how many shirts and what sizes they would need, didn’t have the money to order them, and in two weeks they would lose the buzz.

Instead of giving up, they threw together a simple website with a basic premise: if they could get at least 200 people to reserve the tees, then they would organize and coordinate the printing and ship directly to buyers. If they couldn’t reach their goal, no one would be charged and nothing would happen. It took them about 5 hours to code and build and once it went out it spread like wildfire with them selling over 400 t-shirts and pocketing $2,000 in profit. By itself this would have been impressive, but coupled with all the emails they received from other clubs, communities, and individuals who wanted something similar they knew they were onto something big. A little while later they had a chance to pitch an angel investor about the concept. He liked it so much that he wrote a check that same day. This was all around September 2011. Since then Teespring has added more functionality and products (sweatshirts are my favorite). Their online simulator for t-shirt creating is one of the best out there. You can change a lot of inputs (logos, colors, materials, etc.) On top of all of this; they’ve been accepted to the prestigious incubator, YCombinators’ Class of 2013.

I had a chance to connect with co-founder Walker Williams last week to discuss the apparel space, running a startup outside of SF and NY, and what Teespring’s goals are for 2013.

Alex Taub: What’s the most useful piece of information you’ve learned about the apparel space?

Walker Williams, co-founder of Teespring: I’ve learned that the apparel space, especially the custom apparel space, is tough. We’ve got to quote the job correctly without any human interacting with the order (or it would be impossible to scale), collect customer information and allow time for corrections to be made, get the correct blank products to the correct printer, deliver shipping labels, deliver artwork in a vector format and make sure the products are printed and individually fulfilled in under a week (so the order arrives 7-14 days after the campaign ends). If any one of these components goes wrong, we end up with a late package and an unhappy customer.

Because the problem was so complex with so many points of failure it forced us to address the automation really early in the life of the company, which I think has been key to allowing us to grow so quickly. That said, we still have problems that crop up on a day-to-day basis that we’re still learning and adapting to.

AT: What type of usage are you seeing? What are the use cases for Teespring?

WW: The great thing about Teespring is that it scales to the user, so we see things from friends raising money for a friend with cancer, to funny Mayan Apocalypse Tees, all the way up to larger organizations like TWiT w/ Leo Laporte raising tens of thousands of dollars and powering their entire merchandising through us. The biggest unifying factor we see if that our t-shirts come from communities and causes (the vast majority have some sort of cause behind them).

AT: Is there any other company doing something similar to Teespring and why are you guys better?

WW: A couple “me too” services popped up in the past 6 months but don’t seen to have been able to gather any traction: Ink to the people is probably doing the best and teelaunch was another that pivoted away when they couldn’t pick up steam. That said, we know that the big guns are coming (CustomInk, CafePress) because they’ve both been in touch with us and told us that distributed buying is a space they want to be in. Hopefully, our experience, momentum, and single focus on providing amazing experiences will help us overcome that obstacle and continue to grow.

AT: What’s it like running a startup outside of a tech hub? What’s the biggest challenge?

WW: You know I hear a lot about how you can’t beat Silicon Valley and I understand the points about how the network and atmosphere are geared for entrepreneurs there, but Providence has been exceptionally good to us. We met Bill Cesare, our first investor and now COO (and essentially third co-founder) while we were in Betaspring, the local incubator. We were able to raise a hassle-free round from local angels who have been great to us in terms of supporting us and providing value and connections while still remaining hands-off. For us, it feels like we’ve got such a strong support network out here that we don’t need the “bigger pond” of New York or Silicon Valley to thrive. That said we are actually going out to the Bay Area for at least three months to be part of the YCombinator W13 program.

AT: What do you think about the crowdfunding space? Who are going to be the big winners?

WW: I think crowdfunding is such a young space that it’s hard to pick a winner at this stage. Clearly Kickstarter has shot off to a huge lead (followed closely by sites like Indiegogo and Crowdtilt), but we believe there will be a strong consumer backlash and loss of trust as more and more of these enormous campaigns fail to deliver on even the most basic of rewards. Right now Kickstarter, despite their best efforts to discourage this and make it clear that these projects are not guarantees, has a user base that really expect campaign creators to deliver on their promises. What happens when a project raises 10x their goal and millions and millions of dollars and then fails to deliver? 70% of Kickstarter campaigns miss their ship date and are delayed. How long will consumers continue to place their trust in a service that does little to no vetting? You can see early examples of this with Diaspora and CodeHero, campaigns that failed to deliver on the hype.

We’re hoping that Teespring provides a more guaranteed and smooth crowdfunding experience. You know if you buy a shirt on Teespring it’s going to arrive within a couple weeks of the end of the campaign, it’s going to be beautiful, and if there’s absolutely anything wrong with it you’ve got a phone number you can call for a return, size exchange, question, etc. This sort of crowd funded manufacturing space we’re sitting in doesn’t require buyers to place trust in the seller, they can count on Teespring to facilitate an amazing experience.

I also love the JOBS ACT-enabled investment crowdfunding sites like WeFunder (fellow YC W13 company) and FundersClub though, that has the potential to be a game changer for early-mid stage companies provided they can keep out the fraudsters. With investment, people understand the game aspect of it and it isn’t positioned as a sure thing.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.